While on vacation, I flipped through Ian Lendler’s Alcoholica Esoterica: A Collection of Useful and Useless Information as It Relates to the History and Consumption of All Manner of Booze. It’s clever and pithy, but marred by sophomoric jibes against Christianity and the Catholic Church. Mr. Lendler is apparently one of those guys who assume every negative remark about the Church is intrinsically true and ought to be repeated.
When discussing beer brewing in the Middle Ages, for instance, Lendler asserts that the Church had a vertical monopoly:
The Church owned the breweries, the barley fields, the spice fields, and even the inns where beer was sold. It had an almost total monopoly on European beer for the next three hundred years….
This allegation is awfully hard to believe. The idea of a European-wide monopoly controlled from Rome conflicts with what we know about medieval living. More than one economic historian has remarked that medieval society was highly decentralized and possibly one of the most libertarian cultures of the past 2,000 years. Moreover, we also know that breweries, fields, and inns were often owned by monastic orders, which (due to the way interests were held and rights recognized) is not nearly the same thing as “the Church” owning them.
But we don’t need to rely on outside historical evidence to show Lendler’s mistake. He trips over his own assertion on the very next page.
In a passage about the advent of hops, Lendler points out that hops allowed brewers back then to use less malt, with the result that “they could make twice as much beer at a tenth of the cost of ale.” In addition, hops allowed brewers to preserve beer longer and improve the quality. But, according to Lendler, the Church selfishly blocked the use of hops:
The spices that flavored ale [prior to hops] were big business and the Church owned that business. Hops made the need for spices obsolete, so they kept a tight lid on its use. And considering the Church monopolized the ale industry, that lid was pretty tight.
Hmmm. The Church owned the breweries and the Church owned the spice fields and the Church owned by the inns. If the cost of brewing were to drop drastically, but the Church could keep the prices the same at its inns (which it could, since, according to Lendler, they owned almost all of them), wouldn’t the profits be greater from using hops, thereby offsetting the loss of profits from spice sales, especially since the quality would be better, thereby allowing the inns to charge even more?
In fact, based on Lendler’s statement that hops let brewers “make twice as much beer at a tenth the cost,” the extra ale profit would almost certainly swamp the loss in spice sales. Consider the math in a hypothetical equation. If it cost the Church’s brewer $10 to make a gallon of beer without hops, and the Church’s inns could sell it for $20, that would be a $10 profit for the Church. If the Church’s brewer used hops, he could make a gallon for fifty cents (“twice as much beer at a tenth of the cost”) and give the Church a $19.50 profit. The mark-up on the final product would be 3,900%, whereas the old mark-up was only 100%.
Lendler can’t be correct on both counts. He can be correct on the vertical monopoly or on the suppression of hops, but not both. So which is it? The heck if I know. I’m not going to spend time tracking down his slipshod writing. It’s fun enough for me merely to track down his bogus logic.
Unfortunately, such things happen frequently: popular histories or articles make bogus or half-bogus assertions against the Church, and most readers (and publishers) don’t slow down enough to ask, “Can that really be true?”
It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s observation about the Church in his day: “It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.” Some criticized it for being too militant; others, for being too meek. Some criticized it for being effeminate; others, for being patriarchal. Some criticized it for being gloomy; others, for being optimistic.
Chesterton concluded, “It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.”
Chesterton wrote those words in 1908. Nearly 100 years later, we can still see examples of those sticks flailing away.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
